The culture industry is the book’s term for the fusion of culture and entertainment into a system of mass-produced, standardized commodities. Horkheimer and Adorno present it as the definitive form of “enlightenment as mass deception” (94), arguing that it neutralizes social critique and enforces conformity. A collection of separate entertainment fields creates a unified whole in which “Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together” (94). According to the authors, the culture industry’s primary function is to impose sameness, erasing genuine individuality and novelty by endlessly reproducing proven formulas. As an instrument of domination, it is wielded by the economically powerful to create a “cycle of manipulation and retroactive need” that perpetuates the existing social order (95).

For Horkheimer and Adorno, disenchantment is the Enlightenment process of freeing the world from myth, magic, animism, and supernatural explanations by making nature predictable through rational and scientific knowledge. Drawing on a concept associated with Max Weber, they argue that disenchantment replaces the belief that natural objects possess spirits or intrinsic meanings with calculation, universal laws, and technical control. Its purpose is to overcome humanity’s fear of unknown forces, but it achieves this by treating nature as lifeless material to be classified, exploited, and mastered.